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seacrestkristi

Beach Fanatic
Nov 27, 2005
3,538
36
Yes, NoHall, I did post a pix of Hillary and Diana. Obviously they wanted to meet one another. Did that offend you somehow? It kinda sounds like it. :dunno: Here's some of what Hillary did as First Lady,IMHO, and many others, more than any other First Lady ever attempted. After you read this please tell me what it is that Condi did that you would 'fight to the death' to vote for her as president besides wear a skirt? What action has she done? All she does is talk. What likability factor are you referring to? I find her as cuddly as a cactus. To call Hillary a man because she wears pants as opposed to Condi's skirts is really not right. Kinda like the new PGA trophy for women. :dunno: I just don't see it. Thank you.

From Wiki: Bill Clinton had campaigned heavily on health care in the 1992 election, and he quickly set up the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, headed by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, to come up with a comprehensive plan to provide universal health care for all Americans, which was to be a cornerstone of the administration's first-term agenda. A major health care speech was delivered by Clinton to a joint session of Congress on September 22, 1993,[2] with an overwhelmingly positive response.[3][4] In that speech, President Clinton explained the problem as follows:
Millions of Americans are just a pink slip away from losing their health insurance, and one serious illness away from losing all their savings. Millions more are locked into the jobs they have now just because they or someone in their family has once been sick and they have what is called the preexisting condition. And on any given day, over 37 million Americans -- most of them working people and their little children -- have no health insurance at all. And in spite of all this, our medical bills are growing at over twice the rate of inflation, and the United States spends over a third more of its income on health care than any other nation on Earth.
Hillary Rodham Clinton's leading role in this project was unprecedented for a presidential spouse.[5][6] This unusual decision by President Clinton to put his wife in charge of the project has been attributed to several factors, including the President's desire to emphasize his personal commitment to the enterprise,[6] and also including a quid pro quo in which she would "defend him from sex-related charges."[7]
Although the United States has never had a universal health care system, it does have certain publicly funded health care programs that help to provide for the elderly, disabled, military service families and veterans, and the poor.[8] Additionally, ever since 1986, federal law has guaranteed public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay.[9]

Debate


Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop with former First Lady Hillary Clinton in the fall of 1993 promoting President Clinton's Health Security Act.


Starting on September 28, 1993, Hillary Clinton appeared for several days of testimony before five congressional committees on health care.[3] Opponents of the bill were able to become organized by the time it was finally presented to the Democratic-controlled Congress on November 20, 1993.[3] The bill was a complex proposal running more than 1,000 pages, the core element of which was an enforced mandate for employers to provide health insurance coverage to all of their employees through competitive but closely-regulated health maintenance organizations (HMOs). The full text of the November 20 bill (the "Health Security Act") is available online.[10]
Conservatives, libertarians, and the insurance industry staged a campaign against the "Health Security" plan and criticized it as being overly bureaucratic and restrictive of patient choice.[11] The effort included extensive advertising criticizing the plan, including the famous Harry and Louise ad paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America, which depicted a middle-class couple despairing over the plan's supposed complex, bureaucratic nature.[4][12] Time, CBS News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor ran stories questioning whether there really was a health-care crisis.[13] Op-eds were written against it, including one in The Washington Post by University of Virginia Professor Martha Derthick that said:
In many years of studying American social policy, I have never read an official document that seemed so suffused with coercion and political naivete ... with its drastic prescriptions for controlling the conduct of state governments, employers, drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals and you and me.[14]
U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan qualified his agreement that "there is no health care crisis" by stating "there is an insurance crisis" but also indicated "anyone who thinks [the Clinton health care plan] can work in the real world as presently written isn't living in it."[15] Meanwhile, Democrats, instead of uniting behind the President's original proposal, offered a number of competing plans of their own. Some criticized the plan from the left, preferring a Canadian-style single payer system.
The First Lady's role in the secret proceedings of the Health Care Task Force also sparked litigation in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in relation to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) which requires openness in government. The Clinton White House argued that the Recommendation Clause in Article II of the U.S. Constitution would make it unconstitutional to apply the procedural requirements of FACA to Hillary's participation in the meetings of the Task Force. Some constitutional experts argued to the court that such a legal theory was not supported by the text, history, or structure of the Constitution. [16]Ultimately, Hillary Clinton won the litigation when the D.C. Circuit ruled narrowly that the First Lady of the United States can be deemed a government official (and not a mere private citizen) for purposes of not having to comply with the procedural requirements of FACA.[17]

Defeat

In August of 1994, Democratic Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell introduced a compromise proposal that would have delayed requirements of employers until 2002, and exempted small businesses. However, "Even with Mitchells bill, there were not enough Democratic Senators behind a single proposal to pass a bill, let alone stop a filibuster."[18]
A few weeks later, Mitchell announced that his compromise plan was dead, and that health care reform would have to wait at least until the next Congress. The defeat weakened Clinton politically, emboldened Republicans, and contributed to the notion that Hillary Clinton was a big-government liberal.[19]
The 1994 mid-term election became a "referendum on big government Hillary Clinton had launched a massive health-care reform plan that wound up strangled by its own red tape."[20] In that 1994 election, the Republican revolution led by Newt Gingrich gave the GOP control of the House of Representatives, and the Senate too, ending prospects for a Clinton-sponsored health care overhaul. Comprehensive reform aimed at creating universal health care in the United States has not been seriously considered by Congress since.

Controversy in retrospect and perspective

In 2004, as a U.S. senator from New York, Hillary Clinton argued in the The New York Times that the current health care system is unsustainable, and she offered several solutions.[21] Her article also mentioned areas of agreement with one-time opponent Newt Gingrich, and likewise Gingrich has expressed agreement with Senator Clinton on some aspects of health care, including a bill to modernize medical record keeping.[22][23]
In 2005, referring to her previous efforts at health care reform, Hillary Clinton said "I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done."[19]Again in 2007, she reflected on her role in 1993-1994: "I think that both the process and the plan were flawed. We were trying to do something that was very hard to do, and we made a lot of mistakes."[24]
Hillary Clinton received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and insurance companies for her 2006 re-election in the Senate, including several insurance companies that were members of the Health Insurance Association of America that helped defeat the Clinton Health Plan in 1994.[12] Charles N. Kahn III, a Republican who was executive vice president of the Health Insurance Association in 1993 and 1994, refers to his previous battles with Clinton as "ancient history," and says "she is extremely knowledgeable about health care and has become a Congressional leader on the issue."[12]
In the years since the Clinton effort of 1993-1994, a combination of factors have kept health care off the top of the agenda. For example, politicians have not been eager to confront the forces that successfully frustrated the Clinton effort, and health maintenance organizations have been able to limit cost increases to some extent.[25]
The Clinton health care plan remains the most prominent national proposal associated with Hillary Clinton, and may influence her prospects in the 2008 presidential election. There are some similarities between the Clinton Health Plan and Republican Mitt Romney's health care plan that has been implemented in Massachusetts.[4][26]
Current estimates put US healthcare spending at approximately 15% of gross domestic product, which is the highest in the world,[27] and government spending (including tax benefits) accounts for more than 44.6% of total health spending in the United States.[25] Still, only an estimated 84.3% of citizens have some form of health insurance coverage, either through their employer or purchased individually,[28] and Americans apparently continue to have a relatively low life expectancy compared to other industrialized nations such as Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Sweden.[29] Infant mortality rates also appear to be higher in the United States, despite declines in recent decades.[30] However, health statistics may have less to do with the quality of health care than with variations in the way countries collect their data.[31] Many analysts believe that life expectancy in the United States could be best addressed by decreasing obesity rates,[32] and former President Clinton has made tackling childhood obesity a major priority of his, in recent years
 

Miss Kitty

Meow
Jun 10, 2005
47,011
1,131
71
:shock: ...when is this election?
 

seacrestkristi

Beach Fanatic
Nov 27, 2005
3,538
36
[FONT=verdana,tahoma,helvetica]More Good Things about Hillary: :D [/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,tahoma,helvetica] [/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,tahoma,helvetica]SPEAKING UP FOR CHILDREN'S HEALTH CARE

Hillary joined Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D-NY) this week and called on President Bush to reverse his decision to change the rules for children's health care coverage -- a change that will deny coverage for millions of children across the country.

Hillary helped launch the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) program during the Clinton administration. Now she is fighting in Congress to expand SCHIP, introducing legislation with Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) to provide access to affordable quality health care to all uninsured children. George Bush has threatened to use the power of the White House to make roll back coverage! [/FONT]
"We should not punish children and their families who need healthcare coverage, but that is exactly what the President is proposing. ? The actions of President Bush are not only an attempt to undermine and negate the bipartisan efforts of Congress, they are the actions of an Administration that does not see 8.7 million children without health care as a problem worth solving. I will continue to work with Governor Spitzer and my colleagues in Congress to make sure children and families in New York continue to benefit from this important program," Hillary said.​
[FONT=verdana,tahoma,helvetica]
Bloomberg News reported: [/FONT]
"The president just doesn't see 8.7 million children without insurance as a problem worth solving," said Clinton, 59. She said the administration's new rules amounted to a "sneak attack on America's children and their families."​
[FONT=verdana,tahoma,helvetica]
A SERIOUS PLAN FOR GULF COAST RECOVERY

Hillary repeated her plan for Gulf Coast recovery on Monday at the Hope & Recovery Summit at the University of New Orleans, which was held to measure rebuilding progress along the Gulf Coast on the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina: [/FONT]
"Two years after the national tragedy of Katrina, we still don't have a reliable hurricane protection system. We still haven't rebuilt many schools, hospitals, firehouses or parks. And there are more than 60,000 families living in trailers. We need action by our federal government that leads to real, measurable improvements. ? Rebuilding New Orleans is not a local obligation, it is an American obligation. And we must finally begin to fulfill it. As president, that will not just be my goal -- but my mission."​
[FONT=verdana,tahoma,helvetica]
To read Hillary's full plan for Gulf Coast recovery, visit: http://www.hillaryclinton.com/feature/katrina/

LABOR DAY SUPPORT -- FROM LABOR

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) and United Transportation Union (UTU) endorsed Hillary, noting her record of fighting for working Americans. The IAM is among the nation's largest industrial trade unions, representing over 700,000 active and retired members in airline, aerospace, manufacturing, railroad, woodworking and shipbuilding industries, and is a member of the AFL-CIO. [/FONT]
"Hillary Clinton earned the IAM's endorsement by focusing on jobs, health care, education and trade -- the bread and butter issues of the American middle class," said IAM International President Tom Buffenbarger. "She is the only candidate of either party to come forward with a comprehensive manufacturing policy and the only candidate to connect with millions of Americans who feel invisible to the current administration."​
[FONT=verdana,tahoma,helvetica]
The United Transportation Union represents 125,000 active and retired members in the railroad, bus and public transit sectors across America. [/FONT]
"The UTU has a long history of picking winners early. Hillary will be a president that America's working families can count on. Time and again, as a United States senator, she has stood with us," said UTU President Paul Thompson.​
[FONT=verdana,tahoma,helvetica]
WHAT'S NEXT [/FONT]

[FONT=verdana,tahoma,helvetica]
  1. Mark your calendar for the Women's Finance Council Summit -- Wednesday October 17th in Washington DC. Women from across the country are gathering to discuss policy and politics with extraordinary panels of experts. For general information contact Capricia Marshall at Capricia@hillaryclinton.com or www.hillaryclinton.com/womenssummitt. Please contact Stefanie Freeman sfreeman@hillaryclinton.com for ticket and contribution level information -- spaces are limited -- please respond soon.
  2. Join the Business Women's Council: Join this network of businesswomen from all over the country in a conference call next week with Hillary! Click here to RSVP.
  3. Still Time to Send an E-Card! Send our e-card celebrating women's history to young women voters -- and every woman you know! Click here to view or send the card.
[/FONT]
QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"We will finally have a President who doesn't mind pulling over and asking for directions -- am I right, ladies?"
Hillary, on her "Top 10 Campaign Promises," Late Show with Dave Letterman 8/30/07
 

Smiling JOe

SoWal Expert
Nov 18, 2004
31,644
1,773
[FONT=verdana,tahoma,helvetica]More Good Things about Hillary: :D [/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,tahoma,helvetica]
A SERIOUS PLAN FOR GULF COAST RECOVERY

Hillary repeated her plan for Gulf Coast recovery on Monday at the Hope & Recovery Summit at the University of New Orleans, which was held to measure rebuilding progress along the Gulf Coast on the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina: [/FONT]
"Two years after the national tragedy of Katrina, we still don't have a reliable hurricane protection system. We still haven't rebuilt many schools, hospitals, firehouses or parks. And there are more than 60,000 families living in trailers. We need action by our federal government that leads to real, measurable improvements. ? Rebuilding New Orleans is not a local obligation, it is an American obligation. And we must finally begin to fulfill it. As president, that will not just be my goal -- but my mission."​

And she plans to rebuild NOLA using what money? What about the towns in Mississippi that were creamed? Is she going to rebuild those, too? I understand that the future of NOLA is a problem, but saying that that is obvious to everyone and not special insight on her part. The only reason she mentions NOLA is because she knows that it hits more emotions than the other places which were destroyed. Communities may need assistance being rebuilt after major disasters, but it is not the job of the President to rebuild towns. Of course, the President could ensure that their team won all of the bids to rebuild, if they chose to take on such a mission. That is just politricks, plain and simple.
 

NoHall

hmmmm......can't remember
May 28, 2007
9,032
996
Northern Hall County, GA
Yes, NoHall, I did post a pix of Hillary and Diana. Obviously they wanted to meet one another. Did that offend you somehow? It kinda sounds like it.

I was pretty clear about two things:
  1. My views on Hillary are based on personal preference. Subjective. Inarguable. Not much different than Punzy's, really.
  2. I was answering Kurt's post. Had nothing to do with you.
  3. You can post pictures of Hill and Di in their p.j.s having a spend the night party. I don't really care.

Love Hillary all you want. Don't get personal with me about it, because it's not worth it to me. As for the rest of your post(s), I'm gonna cite Audie:

"Wow, that was long."
 
Last edited:

30A Skunkape

Skunky
Jan 18, 2006
10,285
2,322
54
Backatown Seagrove
I'll give Hillary credit for learning from her mistakes. She clearly understands the best tactic to broaden government intrusion in the medical arena is to enter via the back door. This talking point about Bush denying healthcare to children is bunk-ola. He will happily renew the SCHIP program as it exists;what he rightly opposes is an expansion of the program that broadens the definition of a child to somebody up to 25 years of age living at home (!) and expanding benefits to include families earning up to $80,000 per year (!!!). I don't call an unemployed 24 year old living at home a child, I call them a bum, and people bringing home $80,000 don't need any of my tax dollars to procure insurance for their kiddies. Basically, expanding SCHIP as Hillary desires guarantees hundreds of thousands, if not millions will depend on the government to secure health insurance for them. Then, at some point down the road when the program is to be renewed, there will be an attempt to broaden the beneficiary pool yet again, and again, and the moochers who like somebody else 'taking care of them' will raise a fuss about how unfair they are being treated (dreading of course the confrontion with their deadbeat adult kids about getting off the couch and paying their own way through life).:bang: :pissed:
 

seacrestkristi

Beach Fanatic
Nov 27, 2005
3,538
36
;-) It had nothing to do with me until you criticisized the fact that I posted a pix of her and Lady Diana and then wrongly said she was all talk and no action. That is just not the fact. Sorry. Not looking to :boxing: . Just keeping the facts straight. :blink: Sorry the partial list of what she has done and hopes to do was too long. At least it was something educational. ;-)
 

NoHall

hmmmm......can't remember
May 28, 2007
9,032
996
Northern Hall County, GA
I'll give Hillary credit for learning from her mistakes. She clearly understands the best tactic to broaden government intrusion in the medical arena is to enter via the back door. This talking point about Bush denying healthcare to children is bunk-ola. He will happily renew the SCHIP program as it exists;what he rightly opposes is an expansion of the program that broadens the definition of a child to somebody up to 25 years of age living at home (!) and expanding benefits to include families earning up to $80,000 per year (!!!). I don't call an unemployed 24 year old living at home a child, I call them a bum, and people bringing home $80,000 don't need any of my tax dollars to procure insurance for their kiddies. Basically, expanding SCHIP as Hillary desires guarantees hundreds of thousands, if not millions will depend on the government to secure health insurance for them. Then, at some point down the road when the program is to be renewed, there will be an attempt to broaden the beneficiary pool yet again, and again, and the moochers who like somebody else 'taking care of them' will raise a fuss about how unfair they are being treated (dreading of course the confrontion with their deadbeat adult kids about getting off the couch and paying their own way through life).:bang: :pissed:

One thing I gave her credit for while she was in office the first time was recognizing that health care is crying out for help. I just don't see how anyone is going to be able to fix it without tearing it to the ground first.

Skunky, our hospital in town is the county's largest employer, so I have lots of friends and clients who are doctors or hospital administrator types. They tell me stories about the tug-of-war between them and insurance companies. For instance, when I had my appendix out a few years ago, I was charged $15 for things like adhesive tape. A friend at the hospital said that they have to put $15 on the bill so that they can get $1.50 from the insurance company for it.

Meanwhile I have another doctor friend who just opened an insurance-free clinic. He will file insurance if you want him to, but for minor illnesses and injuries he has flat fees, usually in the $25-$50 range. He makes a profit and people are treated at reasonable rates.

Do you think the madness can ever stop?
 
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